The oldest movie theater in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev was seriously damaged as fire swept through the historic building during the screening of an LGBT movie in a suspected arson attack.

There were no injuries reported among the 100 moviegoers, who
attended the screening of the French film ‘Les Nuits d'Ete’
(Summer Nights) as part of the Molodist film festival program.

However, the landmark Zhovten movie theater, which was opened
back in 1931, suffered severe damage in the incident.

It took the emergency services several hours to put the fire out,
with the flames completely destroying the roof of the building.
The firefighters said that they had discovered three fire sources
inside the movie theater.

The fire allegedly started when an unidentified man tossed an
“incendiary smoke grenade” behind the back rows during the
screening, movie fan Evgeny Zelman wrote on his Facebook page.

“The film had been playing for 20 minutes already when people
in back rows shouted: 'Smoke!'” Aleksey Chaschin, the
festival’s coordinator, said.

“We didn't understand at once what happened,” Chaschin
told the LB.ua website. “We managed to quickly lead people
out from this screening and from other halls in Zhovten. The
first fire truck arrived quickly. Others came when smoke started
billowing out of the windows.”

But Zelman provided a completely different account of events,
saying that the Zhovten evacuation was “disorganized.”

As soon as the smoke appeared, “people started running out,
there was, of course, a crowd, I started pulling handles on the
right – emergency exits – but everything was locked shut,"
he wrote.

According to the Zelmen, the cinema’s personnel had no idea how
to switch on the fire alarm or use a fire extinguisher.

Initial reports in the Ukrainian media cited the festival guests,
who said that anti-gay activists, outraged by the contents of the
movie, might be behind the arson.

‘Les Nuits d'Ete’ tells the story of a Frenchman in the 1950s,
who lives a seemingly perfect life with his wife, but every
weekend goes to a cabin in the forest to dress up as a woman.

There were also suggestions that the fire was connected to the
legal battles around the movie theater, which is fighting hard to
avoid eviction from its building in central Kiev.

“It is public property, and some want to evict its current
renters, who have brought this place a cult following,” Igor
Lutsenko, a member of Kiev’s municipal legislature, wrote on
Facebook.

Kiev mayor and former boxing champ, Vitaly Klitschko, promised
that Zhovten would be rebuilt after the fire.

“The arson of the premise, which became a subject of debate
and legal battles in recent years, can’t be ruled out. We won’t
allow Zhovten, which became a symbol of intellectual cinema among
the moviegoers in the capital, to be taken away from us,”
Klitschko said, as cited in Podrobnosti.ua website.